Peter Beck (schoolmaster)

Francis Peter BeckCVO (27 June 1909 – 17 May 2002) was an English soldier and schoolmaster.

In the 1930s Beck was a peace campaigner, but in 1938, a year before the Second World War, he joined the British Army. After the war he became head master of Cheam School, serving there from 1947 to 1963.

In 1947 he was appointed as head master of Cheam. On 23 September 1957, he found himself at the centre of intense press interest when Prince Charles, Duke of Cornwall, then aged eight, arrived at his school, accompanied by his parents, Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.[2] Beck called a press conference at the school and made an unsuccessful appeal to the news media to be left in peace, but in the eighty-eight days of Charles's first term, no fewer than sixty-eight of them saw stories about the prince and the school carried in a national newspaper.[8] Beck twice caned Charles for "ragging".[2]

Beck retired from Cheam in 1963,[2] a year after being appointed a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order.[9] In 1959 he had resigned his commission in the Regular Army Reserve of Officers.[10] In retirement he lived at Hopton House, near Diss, Norfolk, dying in 2002 at the age of 92.[2]